Research On Design And Jumping Performance Of A New Pneumatic Frog-inspired Robot

As bionic hopping robots have the characters of strong obstacle-overleapingability and great field and environment adaptability, the relative research is apopular subject, recently. In the paper, pneumatic muscles are utilized as the driver,in terms of musculoskeletal system bionics. The model of the frog-inspired hoppingrobot is established, and kinematic and dynamic analysis, trajectory planning,motion simulation, and experiments are carried out in the paper.Frog joints trajectories during jumping are analyzed according to referencesabout hopping robot domestic and overseas, and the factors of muscle performanceare obtained through the analysis of frog jump ing characters and the extensormotion during jumping. To simulate frog muscles, Mckibben pneumatic muscles arechosen to be drivers. A hopping mechanism powered by pneumatic muscles isdeveloped, and the robot pneumatic-mechatronic model is established.Frog motion is divided into two phases, the ground phase and the flight phase.The kinematic model is established and the direct and inverse kinematic problemsare analyzed through D-H method. Crankslider mechanis ms are designed in the hipand knee joints to make the muscles in bioarticular form. The muscle contraction isanalyzed, and the transformation between robot motion and muscle contraction isestablished.The robot dynamic equations are established according to the Lagrangianmethod. The driving torque of each joint can be computed by inverse dynamicanalys is. To analyze the jumping performance, the trajectory planning in joint spacebased on the Genetic Algorithm(GA) is developed, and the optimum is to minimizethe joint torque.The simulation in ADAMS is carried out to describe the jumping motion, andthe spring-damping units are utilized to simulate the pneumatic muscles. Finally,frog-inspired hopping leg was developed experiments of vertical jumping andjumping into a box were conducted with the frog-inspired hopping leg that wasdeveloped, validating the feasibility of the pneumatic frog-inspired hopping robot.